The Mark of The Beast and Sabbath Days

— May 31, 2015

The time has come the Ruach saidto speak of many thingsof new moons, marks and beastsand Saturdays and kingsof why the sabbath is all wrongand if it the new moon brings.

I have been troubled for some time over many things in our understanding of the Bible and the unveiling of YHVH’s plans in these end times. There are as many opinions on the interpretation of the Bible as there are people to give them and there is much polarisation into differing theological camps, many ending up as new denominations.

There are many self-styled theological experts out there who will happily tell anyone with an opposing view that they are wrong and provide yards of Biblical exegesis to prove their point. I claim no such expertise. I have never been to a seminary or obtained a degree in theology but I do believe that YHVH has blessed me with a little common sense and an ability to see connections others can’t see.

So, the two topics that have been giving me some cause for contemplation are the mark of the beast and the Sabbath day. So, let’s deal with the fun one first, the mark of the beast.

Now, before I get into this I will not be quoting heaps of scripture. there are people who have written books on this subject with more Biblical quotes than contained in the whole Bible, or that’s what it seems like. No, I am not going to go down that road otherwise we just get into complex debates about nothing at all. I will however make a couple of quotes to confirm a point but beyond that you do your own research and decide. My basic premise is that YHVH is a common sense El (God) and he made everything capable of understanding by all, so when weighed down with definitions, and meanings and obscure textual proofs go the simplest explanation. You would most likely be right.

The Mark of The Beast

So, keeping it simple, the mark of the beast is going to be something that will do three basic things;

Be something that is the basis of worship.

Be something that identifies a person as belonging to the beasts kingdom.

Be something that will prevent those who refuse to take the mark from buying or selling.

There have been many things that have been identified as the mark of the beast. I remember sitting in Church nearly 30 years ago and hearing a visiting end-times preacher positively and absolutely state that the new-fangled barcode was the mark of the beast. Why? Because there were three double lines in a barcode that were slightly longer than the others. One at the start, one in the middle and one at the end. The double line equated to the number 6 so the three lines gave 666. Obvious, isn’t it? Well, in spite of his claims that we would, we didn’t all get a barcodes tattooed on our foreheads, but today all the evidence points to implanted computer chips. I suggest that is another red herring.

If there is to be a mark for the beast that is an identification it stands to reason that there must be a mark of YHVH that identifies people as his and therefore the beasts mark will be the counterfeit of that. So, to find the mark of the beast, first find the mark of YHVH (this is where you get a couple of scriptures).

Let’s do a word search on “Mark”.

(Note: I use the King James version as being the most reliable bible available. You will never find me quoting corrupted versions such as the NIV, RSV, NAB and most others. certainly never from The Message, which is not a bible but a paraphrase.)

The KJV gives 37 hits for the word Mark. The first is important because the first mention of a word in scripture gives both context and meaning for interpretation or other uses.

Genesis 4:15 “And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”

This ‘mark’ was something that identified Cain and was easily recognisable to any other person. It set him apart from everyone else. So, if there is a mark of YHVH it should do the same thing.

Ezekiel 9:4-6 shows us where YHVH places His mark when the Man clothed in white linen was instructed to mark all YHVH’s people on the forehead and then the destroying angel was told not to harm those with the mark. The forehead, the frontal lobe is where our real time thought processes take place, where the expression of our belief system is processed and is turned into actions.

We now have a mark that identifies and is expressed as an action. Most of the rest of the uses of the work ‘mark’ is in the context of taking note of, or having regard to something, so let’s skip to the next ones that have anything to do with identification. They are those much quoted verses in Revelation, that is 13:16-17, 14:9-11, 15:2, 16:2, 19:20 and 20:24; verses which strike fear into the heart of every uncertain Christian. Yes, that’s where the beast comes around and puts his mark in the forehead or right hand and no-one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, then nasty things happen to those who refuse and they get their heads chopped off.

OK, we went searching for YHVH’s mark and found out about the beast’s, so does YHVH mark his people, is there a sign that they set apart, and if so how? Doing a word search on ‘sign’ pops up a lot of interesting things. The first mention is Exodus 4:8 which gives us context and meaning “And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the voice of the latter sign.” So, a sign is something that is a unique identifier, something that gives credence and authority to something.

The next use of ‘sign’ is in Exodus 8:23 and now YHVH uses a sign to set apart His people. The plague of flies. There were flies all over the Egyptians but no flies on us! Israel was set apart, by a sign. So we have a sign being something unique, that has authority, and sets apart.

Where next with the ‘sign’? Well that’s in Exodus 13:9 when YHVH gives us the Torah, the Law, he says it is a sign, but look where it is placed. In our foreheads and in our right hand! Now you know where satan got his idea from, even counterfeiting YHVH’s mark in the same place YHVH puts his. So is YHVH’s mark the Torah, or more correctly what you do with it? I think we are getting close.

The very next use of the word sign is in Exodus 31:13; “Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily my Sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.” Here YHVH definitively and absolutely tells us that His sign is the Sabbath! And just to make sure we get it He repeats Himself a few verses later, verse 17 where he says “It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” Doubled up! Two or more witnesses! Whenever YHVH gives something as an unchanging command he repeats it very soon after, usually in the same book (Refer to the book “Doubleness in the Bible“).

Keeping the Sabbath is both a sign and an absolute.

This is YHVH’s mark. Observing the Sabbath, therefore, the mark of the beast is a day of worship!

Ok now that we know what the mark of the beast is let’s move on to the next thing that has been bugging me, The Sabbath day. What day is it?

The Sabbath Day

Christians keep Sundays, is that the Sabbath? Actually, no. Let’s go back a few years, like about 1600 to the early Roman Church. History indicates and the Roman church itself proclaims that they deliberately changed the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.

Wow, this is important, is there evidence? Yes heaps of it, from the Roman Catholics themselves;

“In the Convert’s Catechism of Catholic Doctrine, we read:

Which is the Sabbath day?

Saturday is the Sabbath day.

Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday?

We observe Sunday instead of Saturday because the Catholic Church, in the Council of Laodicea, (AD 336) transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday….

Why did the Catholic Church substitute Sunday for Saturday?

The Church substituted Sunday for Saturday, because Christ rose from the dead on a Sunday, and the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles on a Sunday.

By what authority did the Church substitute Sunday for Saturday?

The Church substituted Sunday for Saturday by the plenitude of that divine power which Jesus Christ bestowed upon her!

—Rev. Peter Geiermann, C.SS.R., (1946), p. 50.

– See more at: http://www.sabbathtruth.com/free-resources/article-library/id/916/catholic-church-admits-they-made-the-change#sthash.3GopX7Qt.dpuf”

That’s a matter of record, so Sunday is not the Sabbath.
Is Saturday correct?

Where did Saturday come from. It was invented by Rome in the person of Emperor Julius Caesar when the Julian calendar was implemented in 46AD. This was an attempt to make the whole Roman Empire conform to a single dating system. The days became named after gods and festivals would recur on certain dates, not by astronomical observation. This was the beginning of ‘changing times and seasons’ by the beast system that the Bible warns us of.

Gregorian calendar was implemented by Pope Gregory in 1582 and in order to make the change he took ten days off the existing Julian Calendar. So overnight we lost more than a week, and if that happened on a Saturday it means the next day in the week was Tuesday, not Sunday. Different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar as time went by, some many, many years after Gregory. So you had the situation where one country has Sunday on a Sunday, but just cross the border they were still on Julian time and it was Wednesday, or something. (For more on calendars go to Time and Date)

OK, where does that leave us? In a mess actually. One of the biggest errors made by Saturday Sabbath keepers is the rotation of the weeks as we know it today is assumed to have always been the same since creation. There is absolutely no way that we can be certain that Saturday has always been a Sabbath on a weekly seven day rotation, even before it was ever called Saturday. It most likely has not.

Oh dear, where does that leave us? Probably a good thing to go back to the Bible. How did YHVH tell us to determine days and times, feast days and Sabbaths?

Again, that is obvious. The Year was to start on the New Moon nearest the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. Exodus 12:1-3.

Each month was started with the New Moon and but the Bible is a little unclear on whether the Sabbaths were counted from the New Moon or were just a regular seven day cycle regardless of when the New Moon was. There are arguments for both camps, just as there are arguments for whether the New Moon was the actual day of conjunction (when the sun moon and earth are in alignment and so the moon itself is not visible) or the day when the first sliver of a crescent was seen at sunset, which could be 1-3 days after the conjunction.

Unfortunately YHVH did not write us a scripture saying; “Thus sayth the Lord, when you see a slim crescent moon at sunset after there has been no moon, then the day starting at sunset of the sighting is the first day of the new month and it is a Sabbath unto you. Then count seven days from that date and it shall be the Sabbath also every seventh day until the next sighting of the crescent moon.”

No He never told us that, it would be nice if He did, but He didn’t. So where did all this come from and why did He not feel it necessary to precisely instruct his people about the New Moon when He gave explicit instructions about what was to happen on those days and the feast days which were determined by the New Moon. There is good Biblical evidence for the Sabbath being on specific, regular days of the month, the 8th day, the 15th, 22nd and 29th. The 29th being also day 1 of the new month.

I think that He did not do it because He did not need to and here we get onto another very popular misconception that clouds the judgement of many Biblical scholars. Moses was not stupid!

Too many time I see theologians and commentators remarking how such and such could not be possible in those days with the limited understanding that they had, when, if they truly thought it through, they would see that they had adopted evolutionary thinking.

Moses was born twenty years after the death of Adam. He knew Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech, all relatives of his. Moses died when Abraham was in his 60s and Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah and Eber were all around when Isaac was young. So Abraham, Issac and Jacob were only two generations (in terms of passing on knowledge) from Adam.

Now, are you going to believe YHVH or man? Adam was created perfect, with a brain capacity we can only imagine. He named all the animals and in that naming showed an understanding of both the physiological and spiritual nature of the species. He didn’t call them Fluffy or Patch, he named the species, Lion, Ox, Eagle, etc. and in the use of the Hebrew words he gave them showed an amazing (to us) understanding of what each animal was. In my book “We Are I Am – Origins” I paint Adam as, in our terms, super intelligent, with understanding of biology, physics and astronomy amongst others. If I have over done it there is one thing for certain. Adam was not a grunting caveman!

Adam, and by his teaching to his family, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew how to recognise and count season and days, months and weeks. Isaac knew about genetics and selective breeding, he was no dummy! So YHVH did not need to include specific instructions about how to recognise a New Moon or a Full Moon, everyone already knew.

Moses was sixth generation from Abraham and we know that Abraham saw the sons of Isaac before he died, but remember Shem was around when Isaac was young and Eber even saw Jacob in his youth. So again we have only two generations removed for the passing on of knowledge, but when the Torah was written it came straight from the mouth of YHVH.

OK, having established that Moses was no dummy, why does the Torah only really deal with post flood topics that were new to Israel, like how to spot the effects of skin cancer due to increased radiation from the loss of the Earth’s protective water layer which rained upon the earth for forty days and nights (that’s another story). It just doesn’t make sense for YHVH to go into great detail about the Tabernacle, the vestments, the sacrifices, the Sabbath, what we do and what we don’t do and then leave us in ambiguity about what day this was to all happen on. I think he didn’t need to mention that at all because everyone knew when the New Moon happened.

Why was the calculation on months and weeks so easy? I believe it was because at that time the moon rotated around the earth once every twenty eight days exactly!

If you saw the Full Moon you knew that fourteen days later would be the New Moon and the start of a new month. You didn’t need to wait for the first crescent, it all happened regular as clockwork. So what went wrong.

Remember Joshua’s long day? Joshua 10:11–13 (actually that name is Yeshuah, the same as the messiah, anglicised into Joshua, another story for another day). The sun stood still for about a whole day. What happened there we don’t really know. Some propose a miracle but some observers of planetary motion have shown how that could have happened if there was a major astronomical event that interfered with the Earth gravitationally causing it to flip on its axis.

Then there is also 2 Kings 20 where Hezekiah asked YHVH to make the sun go back on its passage by ten degrees. The earliest known record of the calculation of the Moon’s conjunction is from Babylon at about 1000 BC. Joshua’s longs day was 1405 BC, so what happened? Why are there no detailed moon conjunction calculations before that date. Why did Moses not have that all figured out?

I think that before Joshua’s long day there was no need, but after that the moon was severely disturbed in its orbit, and possibly the earth too, such that the length of the lunar cycle went from 28 days to something over 29 days. The effects of Joshua’s long day did not become apparent until a few hundred years later when holy days, in various lunar related religions, started getting out of sync. That’s when the Babylonians realised they had to figure this out.

One thing we do know is that the earth is slowing in its rotation and the moons orbit is increasing, moving away from the earth. As the orbit increases that, according to the laws of physics, results in a slowing down of the orbital speed. The measured increase in orbit is only a few centimetres a year, so in the last 3000 years there has been little change if the increase is constant, therefore whatever shifted the orbit from 28 days to 29.5 must have been quite an event!

So what does this all mean for us?

I think it is established that the Sabbath isn’t Sunday. But neither is it Saturday, because we actually can’t firmly establish the day from either the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. So, the best method is to use the new moon, but is the new moon the sighted crescent or the conjunction?

If my theory is right and Joshua’s long day was the event that changed the moon’s orbit the sighted moon suddenly becomes important, not for starting the New Moon day but for establishing that it has occurred!

Think about this, no one calls the day of the full moon as the day when it starts to wane, it is the day that it is full, so why would Israel have called the New Moon the it started to wax.

Let’s factor in another element in to this discussion. I understand the earliest known record of the sighted moon being used was from 767 AD when Anan Ben Daud founded the Karaite Sect of Judaism. Up until that date Rabbinical Judaism never used the sighted moon to start the month and the use of the sighted moon cannot be found in the Bible. Let’s see if the sighted moon makes sense because as Judge Judy says “If it doesn’t make sense it probably isn’t true!”

YHVH called out Israel to be a unique, a peculiar people. We had to be different from everyone else. We were not to adopt the practises of the pagan nations around us. Israel was not to worship the sun, the moon or the stars, just use them for the purpose they were made. They had come out of Egypt, from the worship of Isis and Horus, to Cannan where Astarte and Molech and other pagan gods ruled. In all of these pagan cultures they worshipped the moon as a crescent, now do you seriously expect me to believe that YHVH somehow told Israel, through a non-biblical source to calculate HIS holy days by a system used by all the pagans Israel had ever encountered from Egypt to Babylon! It just doesn’t make sense, even less when one considers that crescent moons are used in many other false religions such as Hinduism and witchcraft and is today the symbol of the most evil of all ideaologies, Islam.

It just does not make sense! So that leaves us with only one option. The Conjunctive Moon.

In First Samuel 20:5 David tells us that “….behold, tomorrow is the new moon and I should not fail to sit with the king at meat…” This comment is repeated by Jonathan in verse 20:18. So the day of the New Moon was known in advance of the date itself, but, another interesting factor now steps in. Samuel 20:24-27 describes Saul waiting for David at table during the observance of the new moon. It shows the foreknowledge of the day on which it would occur, but adds the fact that two days were celebrated as rest days with commemorative meals.

This was some four hundred years after Joshua’s long day and I think the effects of the slowed down moon orbit was now noticeable. The date is about 1000 BC which is about the same time as the Babylonians realised that they needed to do calculations on the conjunction.

My take on this is that the conjunctive New Moon was used to determine the start of the month from the very beginning of time. It was simple then because it was exactly 28 days, so one month flowed into another without break. Then Adam messed it all up and “…the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain…”. The orderly creation was made disorderly and continues into disorder, so now instead of having only one day for the New Moon day it has become sometimes necessary to have two because the lunar month was now something over 29 days, not 28 and the year was no longer 364 days but around 365.

So how DO we determine the Sabbath day?

What makes sense to me is that the New Moon is the key, and that is the actual day, the conjunction. After the month and day got stretched people did in fact look for the first crescent moon, but I suggest that was not to mark the start of the New Moon day, but rather to confirm that it had ended, so they could again blow the Shofar and go back to work.

Today we don’t need to do that. With our very accurate astronomical calendars we can predict years ahead when the new moons are to be, provided of course we don’t have another day like Joshua prayed for. But now the problem is that in order to stick to the seven day week commandment after the start of each month we have to add a day or two here and there. I think we do that by celebrating the new moon on the day of conjunction (from sunset to sunset) but we do not use Jerusalem as the benchmark.

You see, the international dateline does mess that up too. Having a fixed point for the start of a day means that someone, somewhere is holding the Sabbath on the wrong day, but that is the beauty of the new moon, everyone on earth has a time that is specific to their location, so they simply keep the day that it happens at their location and count every seven days thereafter. When they get to day 29 that is a Sabbath but it is no longer also the new moon. That could be the next day or even the next after that. That is why later in Bible history, the time of King Saul and David, we see references to two days of the new moon. I don’t think that during the time of the Judges and Kings there was a third day, but perhaps that happened because of Hezekiah and the sun going back ten degrees. Soon after that northern Israel was all gone into captivity and Judah went to Babylon some hundred years later. There was no temple and it all became academic.

So academic in fact that the Sanhedrin had to set up a Calendar Court in 516BC, whose function it was to observe the moon and determine when the New Moon happened. I think that this courts original task was to observe the last sliver of the waning moon knowing that the new moon would be about a day later. Seeing no moon at all the next evening the new moon day would be declared and work ceased that day, then as soon as the first crescent was observed the Shofar was blown again indicating that at sunrise the next morning work would resume.

Perhaps Anan Ben Daud’s sighted moon theology was not just a mechanism to save his skin, he could have been advocating simply what the Calendar Court was trying to determine, but with a twist. Remember he was standing before the Islamic Caliphate trying to find a reason not to be killed. What better than advocating a crescent moon as the start of the new month for Jews, just like the Moslems did. “Good man” said the Caliphate, “you are coming round to our way of thinking. Go ahead and teach all Jews to do this and you will live”.

Or perhaps, between 516BC and Jeshuah’s birth the emphasis on the observations had shifted to observing the first crescent moon. Maybe that is why Jeshuah celebrated Passover with his disciples the day before the rest of Judaism (Matthew. 26:21; Mark. 14:18) because Jeshuah was following another calendar, the conjunctive moon. Leon Morris sees this as the most likely solution to the enigma, he writes;

“The most natural reading of the Synoptists shows the meal there to be the Passover. The most natural reading of John shows Jesus as crucified at the very time the Passover victims were slain in the temple. While it is undoubtedly possible so to interpret the evidence as to make both tell the same story it seems preferable to see them as following different calendars. According to the calendar Jesus was following the meal was the Passover. But the temple authorities followed another, according to which the sacrificial victims were slain the next day.”

Now I know some will complain, I can almost hear the sighted moon camp saying “what about the not knowing the day nor the hour bit?” Well we still don’t know. A lot of opinion out there is for the return of Jeshuah on the feast of Trumpets, and we won’t know exactly when until we see the crescent moon. Possibly, but by then I think we will be so close with the world falling apart around us that a day here or there won’t matter and arguing about that now is pointless.

We all agree that Jeshuah was without sin, so he had to keep the feast at the right time, but he was also obedient to the rulers over him. That I think is why as a child, a young man and during His ministry he followed the accepted Sabbath and Holy Days. But, I suggest Jeshuah knew the days were out of sync, and he was not sinning by observing either the feasts as laid down by the Sanhedrin, the spiritual authority of the day, or on the eve of his arrest by having Passover with His disciples a day early, on the day of the real New Moon. That is why the Ruach Hakodesh had Paul write in Colossians 2:16 “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:”

That therefore being said one must now say that if you accept and keep the Sabbath according to the crescent moon, or the conjunctive moon then I am in no position to judge you on that if you do it in the integrity of your heart as worship to YHVH.

For me personally, the conjunctive moon, since we can accurately calculates its presence even though we can’t see it, and for all the other reasons I give above, is the one on which I will base my Sabbaths and Festivals.

The Calendar below is worked out based on making the conjunctive new moon day one of every month and keeping every seventh day thereafter as a Sabbath. You will note that seven times a year there are extra days between the 29th day of each month and the next new moon. We can’t do anything about this because the length of the month and year has changed astronomically. For me, I just consider this a gift from YHVH that every month I get a two or three day holiday.

Conjunctive Moon Sabbath Day Calendar 2015

The Mark of the Beast and the Sabbath:

Right, so now we have a way to calculate the Sabbaths according to the conjunctive moon, and accommodate the messed up lunar orbit and longer year, so what about the mark of the beast? How does that fit in to all this?

Earlier I showed that the Roman church changed the Saturday worship to Sunday. The Julian calendar was an attempt to standardise the problems of the stretched out year and the lunar calendar while incorporating the Biblical seven day week. Changes in both the Julian and Gregorian calendar mean that we can no longer be absolutely sure that, if we are supposed to simply count every seven days since creation, the current regular seventh day Sabbath, is Saturday or Wednesday or some other day of the week. Note that there is even a claim from some historians that whole chunks of the middle ages did not actually exist! A bit of a worry if you rely on a calendar for your Sabbaths to find that whole years are missing.

What we do know is that the current Pope has called for Sunday to be recognised as a sacred day of worship world-wide and some countries are contemplating legislation for enforcing that, or in the USA the activation of the existing ‘Blue Laws’, which prohibit work on the Sunday. But any blanket law will have opposition from Moslems who worship on Fridays and Jews who keep Saturday as do SDA’s and Hebrew Roots followers. Also that would offend Hindus and many other faiths that use any convenient day of the week.

But that all may change. There is a move to introduce the World Calendar.

This will give the world four quarters of exactly 91 days each.

Each quarter will have two 30 day months and one 31 day month.

January first will always be a Sunday, as will the days of the week in each month always be a certain date.

The extra day a year is handled by a World Day at the end of the year. That is a nothing day belonging to no month or day of the week.

After the world day its Sunday January first.

Leap years are accommodated by adding another World Day at the end of June. Same thing, a non-day, that last day of June is Saturday 31st, then the non-day, then the next day will be Sunday July 1st.

If this comes in with the one world government and one world church you can see how it will be easy to legislate Sundays as the only day of worship for the World Wide Religion. Nice, regular, predictable and under their control.

Right let’s wrap this up.

I believe that the mark of the beast, and remember the beast is a kingdom or order of government, is a specified day of worship enforceable by law. That day is most likely to be Sunday regardless of whether it is the Gregorian or the World Calendar.

The Sabbath is the day of the conjunctive New Moon and every seventh day after that. It will never be the same date on whatever calendar is enforced world-wide.

So, how do we get the unable to buy and sell bit?

Think about this, if they legislate Sunday and you want to keep Saturday, your work then has to be closed on Sunday and you have to have a two day period without work. You could probably hide from this and live ok what you earn Monday to Friday.

But if the Sabbath moves each month then you have a very different kettle of fish. It’s Monday morning and you go in to work having just has Sunday off, but then you tell your boss that the conjunction on the new moon is tomorrow, so you won’t be in for work then or on any other Tuesday for the next four weeks, then the following month the Sabbath will be Wednesday. Your boss will only have two words for you: “You’re fired!”

Now if you are a businessman, think about this. You want to close your business on the Sabbath, your workers are up in arms and demand their pay because they don’t want the day off. You say you will open on Sundays to compensate but none of them can legally work on that day. The law doesn’t allow it. Next thing you find yourself in court being prosecuted for breaching the Sunday Closed for Business Act!

If you can’t get a job, or you can’t keep your business running because you are following the lunar Sabbath then it won’t be very long before you have no money, have sold all your possessions and cannot buy or sell, even to stay alive!

It will be impossible to hide if you keep a lunar Sabbath, and if you do keep it you have no income and can’t buy or sell, then the mark of the beast enforcers will get you. Remember, Yeshuah promises to protect His people during this time and there is no pre-tribulation rapture (another story).

I suggest that there will be very few who adopt the Conjunctive Moon Sabbath, but I am convinced that the lunar month is the only one that YHVH gave us to follow, and we must keep the Sabbaths in accordance with that calendar.